1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computers and computer networks. More particularly, the invention relates to collect and process information of an Internet user, referred to as target processing in Internet. The term “target” refers to a user (e.g., an individual) of the Internet being identified as a target for further potential identification as a suspect and/or an offender conducting malicious and/or unlawful Internet activities. Throughout this document, the terms “user”, “individual”, “suspect”, and “target” may be used interchangeably depending on the context except where otherwise specified.
2. Background of the Related Art
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standardized Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private and public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, and other technologies. The Internet carries a vast array of information resources and services, most notably the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail. In addition it supports popular services such as online chat, file transfer and file sharing, gaming, commerce, social networking, publishing, video on demand, and teleconferencing and telecommunications. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications allow person-to-person communication via voice and video.
Digital technologies and communications used in the Internet are rapidly changing the world and every aspect of our lives. Instant messaging, blogging, chatrooms, online shopping, banking, social networking, etc. have literally tightly integrated our daily lives with electronic transactions and activities. We refer to this world made of digital devices (optical fibers, routers, servers, switches, bridges, etc.,), digital languages (Internet protocols, applications and services), digital content (images, documents, text, voice, video, etc.) and digital users (i.e., users/consumers of digital content) as the “Cyber-World”. Along with the Cyber-World's phenomenal growth has been a growth in computer-related crimes targeting consumers, business and governments. Fraud, identity theft, commercial and government espionage, extortion, and child endangerment are just a few manifestations of the new form of crime in the Cyber-World. The nature of Cyber-World crime presents complex new challenges for law enforcement with regards to identifying crimes before they occur, investigating them, collecting and analyzing evidences, identifying suspects, as well as apprehending and prosecuting offenders.
The counter-criminal/counter-terrorism communities (e.g., law enforcement agents (LEAs), or agents) currently use two different methods for monitoring the actions of a suspect. First, as per the interception rules prevalent in different countries, e.g., CALEA mandate in the United States, ETSI standard in Europe, etc., agents obtain a warrant against the suspect and then intercept the network traffic at various Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This allows them to intercept communications that involve a suspect's known accounts. Current state-of-art Lawful Intercept products intercept VoIP traffic, MMS and SMS messages, e-mail traffic, etc. Secondly, agents also look at publicly accessible information such as from the World Wide Web, to obtain more information on the suspect. This second step is usually executed by agents who make use of a search engine such as Google® (a registered trademark of Google, Inc., Inc., Mountain View, Calif.), YAHOO!® (a registered trademark of Yahoo!, Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif.) Search, etc. to search and parse through all the digital traces left by the suspect. The information retrieved is then loaded into a database where agents connect the dots by manually querying the database.